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Read Ebook: A Key to Lord Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' by Gatty Alfred
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Ebook has 806 lines and 25900 words, and 17 pages
fer to the foot-races of the ancients. "More than my brothers are to me," is repeated in P. lxxix., 1.
Very beautifully is the picture continued of the ship's passage, and he appeals to it for safely conducting
"Thy dark freight, a vanish'd life."
The placid scene, which he had imagined as attending the vessel, harmonizes with the home-bred fancy, that it is sweeter
"To rest beneath the clover sod, That takes the sunshine and the rains;"
that is, to be buried in the open churchyard;
"Or where the kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God."
that is, in the chancel of the church, near the altar rails; than if, together with the ship, "the roaring wells" of the sea
"Should gulf him fathom deep in brine; And hands so often clasp'd in mine, Should toss with tangle and with shells."
This Poem would describe a calm and quiet day in October--late autumn.
The stillness of the spot is just broken by the sound of the horse chestnut falling through the dead leaves, and these are reddening to their own fall. No time of the year is more quiet, not even is the insect abroad: the waves just swell and fall noiselessly, and this reminds him of
"The dead calm in that noble breast Which heaves but with the heaving deep."
An ecstacy follows: in which the soul of the Poet seems to mount, like a dove rising into the heavens with a message of woe tied under her wings; and so the disembodied soul leaves its "mortal ark"--"our earthly house of this tabernacle"-- and flees away
"O'er ocean-mirrors rounded large"
, until the ship comes in sight, when it lingers "on the marge," the edge of the sea, weeping with the piteous cry--
"Is this the end of all my care? Is this the end? Is this the end?"
Then it flies in sport about the prow of the vessel, and after this seems to
"return To where the body sits, and learn, That I have been an hour away."
The tears shed by the widower, when he wakes from a dream of his deceased wife, and "moves his doubtful arms" to find her place empty; are like the tears he himself is weeping over "a loss for ever new," a terrible void where there had been social intercourse, and a "silence" that will never be broken. For he is lamenting
"the comrade of my choice, An awful thought, a life removed, The human-hearted man I loved, A Spirit, not a breathing voice."
Hallam is now only a remembrance--no longer endowed with bodily functions, and the survivor cannot quite accept what has happened.
He therefore asks Time to teach him "many years"--for years to come--the real truth, and make him feel that these strange things, over which his tears are shed, are not merely a prolonged dream; and he begs that his fancies, hovering over the approaching ship, may quite realise that it brings no ordinary freight, but actually the mortal remains of his friend.
The difficulty in apprehending his complete loss is further shown by his address to the ship, saying, that if it had arrived in port, and he saw the passengers step across the plank to shore; and amongst them came Hallam himself, and they renewed all their former friendship; and Hallam, unchanged in every respect, heard his tale of sorrow with surprise:
"I should not feel it to be strange."
Both this and the previous Poem express the difficulty we feel in realising the death of some one who is dear to us. So Cowper wrote, after losing his mother, and in expectation that she would yet return:
"What ardently I wish'd, I long believed, And disappointed still, was still deceived."
A stormy change in the weather occurs: the winds "roar from yonder dropping day," that is, from the west, into which the daylight is sinking. And all the sights and sounds of tempest alarm him for the safety of the ship, and
"But for fancies which aver That all thy motions gently pass Athwart a plane of molten glass, I scarce could brook the strain and stir That makes the barren branches loud."
Yet, in fear that it may not be so--the sea calm and the wind still--"the wild unrest" would lead him to "dote and pore on" the threatening cloud, and the fiery sunset.
This Poem is highly metaphysical. He asks whether Sorrow, which is his abiding feeling, can be such a changeling, as to alternate in his breast betwixt "calm despair" and "wild unrest?" ; or does she only just take this "touch of change," as calm or storm prevails? knowing no more of transient form, than does a lake that holds "the shadow of a lark," when reflected on its surface.
Being distinct from bodily pain, Sorrow is more like the reflection than the thing reflected. But the shock he has received has made his mind confused, and he is like a ship that strikes on a rock and founders. He becomes a
"delirious man, Whose fancy fuses old and new, And flashes into false and true, And mingles all without a plan."
He hails the ship--"thou comest"--and feels as if his own whispered prayer for its safety, had been helping to waft it steadily across the sea. In spirit, he had seen it move
"thro' circles of the bounding sky"--
the horizon at sea being always circular --and he would wish its speedy arrival, inasmuch as it brings "all I love."
For doing this, he invokes a blessing upon all its future voyages. It is now bringing
"The dust of him I shall not see Till all my widowed race be run."
The ship arrives, the "dear remains" are landed, and the burial is to take place.
It is something, worth the mourner's having, that he can stand on English ground where his friend has been laid, and know that the violet will spring from his ashes.
Laertes says of Ophelia,
"Lay her in the earth And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring!"
A beautiful invitation follows to those, who are sometimes irreverent bearers:
"Come then, pure hands, and bear the head That sleeps or wears the mask of sleep, And come, whatever loves to weep, And hear the ritual of the dead."
Even yet, before the grave is closed, he would like, as Elisha did on the Shunammite woman's child, to cast himself, and
"thro' his lips impart The life that almost dies in me;"
but still he resolves to form the firmer resolution, and to submit; though meanwhile treasuring the look and words that are past and gone for ever.
From the Danube to the Severn--from Vienna to Clevedon--the body has been conveyed, and was interred by the estuary of the latter river, where the village of Clevedon stands.
The Wye, a tributary of the Severn, is also tidal; and when deepened by the sea flowing inward, its babbling ceases; but the noise recurs when the sea flows back.
So does the Poet's power of expressing his grief alternate: at times he is too full in heart to find utterance; he "brims with sorrow"--but after awhile, as when "the wave again is vocal in its wooded" banks,
"My deeper anguish also falls, And I can speak a little then."
He knows the "lesser grief" that can be told, also the "deeper anguish which cannot be spoken:" his spirits are thus variably affected.
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